How It Comes (and doesn't go)
by Salazarfalcon
Summary: Raven always remembered, not because it came on with a breath of fire and flame but crept instead, like some small thing. Like some small thing slipping inside, so little and beaten and afraid of being unwelcome. It was on a winter morning that Raven realized that happiness had made a home in him.


How It Comes (and doesn't go)

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Summary: Raven always remembered, not because it came on with a breath of fire and flame but crept instead, like some small thing. Like some small thing slipping inside, so little and beaten and afraid of being unwelcome. It was on a winter morning that Raven realized that happiness had made a home in him.

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AN: This is me, shipping Raven/Happiness for life.

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Raven always remembered, not because it came on with a breath of fire and flame but crept instead, like some small thing. Like some small thing slipping inside, so little and beaten and afraid and all it needed was a corner, and Raven could give it a corner. He could spare that much.

Except that little things grew, and then it needed more than just a corner. It needed a box and some warmth and to be fed, and Raven could do those things because it didn't ask for much. Not at first.

Then it needed a bedroom, and then it needed all of him, and it happened so slowly that he had the space to give.

It was on a barren winter morning that Raven realized that happiness had made a home in him.

The misery and shame, familiar and intimate like his oldest friends still paid rent but happiness stayed for free, like the friend that pays debts in dinners and time instead of with money so that Raven couldn't be upset about the change.

It happened so slowly that he didn't even notice.

The first night he slept without nightmares was when Brave Vesperia moved into the new headquarters. It was the tail end of springtime and all the rooms smelt of wet paint and sawdust, and Yuri coughed and Karol opened all the windows and Raven was pretty sure that Judy slept in a tree that night, but Raven slept for eight hours without turning over with only warm fragments greeting him in the morning. It wasn't a hostel, wasn't a jail cell, wasn't his room with Altosk that was essentially bare. It wasn't even a tent. This was a room that they'd worked on together, that Yuri had painted even though it wasn't for him, a warm brown with accents in the lurid pink that Raven liked so much. This was the room that Raven hadn't cared a whit about until he'd seen it.

That should have been the first hint but it wasn't, because happiness still cowered in its corner, waiting to see if he was friend or foe.

Had he been asked, Raven would have said foe without hesitation, but that was probably why he wasn't asked in the first place.

He didn't know when he stopped feeling, really feeling, like he was in someone's debt.

Alexei Dinoia was long dead, the Don even deader, but his most recent keeper most certainly wasn't. Maybe it was how Yuri had to visibly work to keep his mouth under control until he didn't need to think about it quite so much, when his barbs came with something like affection and camaraderie instead of the veiled resentment. Maybe it was how Karol watched him, not pityingly, but with a sort of wide-eyed look you give your parents and not your subordinates, while still somehow managing to bark out orders with the best of them.

Even Yuri obeyed –most of the time, Raven usually had to amend- when he got that steely finality in his voice, and Raven knew later that the thing that joined happiness in its box and blanket was pride.

It was in the beginning of summer that he realized that no one blamed him anymore.

It was something that Raven lived with for so long that it almost hurt more to not have it anymore. There was almost a safety in it, to know that he was in someone's debt, that he belonged to someone, that someone was in charge of him. That was the knight in him, he thought with a disgusted little snort, the part of him that liked having orders because it made things so much easier.

It was always the same thing, just with a different master, and Raven was kind of okay with that.

Until Raven was his own man and he realized that Estelle wasn't sending him two letters a week because she wanted to make sure that he wasn't backsliding. Until he realized that he could say no to Yuri and feel absolutely no guilt for it (and even some vindictive pleasure sometimes, because world-saver or not, Yuri Lowell was still a shit-stirring little hellion). When Karol came flying up to him in a panic because he didn't know how to train the new guild members and he wanted advice, not help or a push-button solution.

Raven didn't know when he went from guild dog to guild member –dog was easy, dog was _normal_- but it happened so slowly that he couldn't even track the process until it was too far ahead to step out of.

And happiness crept out of its box and whined a little bit, and Raven didn't give two thoughts before feeding it.

The space between summer and fall was the season of apple-picking. It was a universal rule; if the harvest was good and there were apples to pick, that was just one more thing that got added to the long list of things to do, right up there with cleaning the guild toilets and sweeping. There was never any question and even Yuri (who sometimes tried so hard to appear serious that it was laughable) didn't kick up a fuss about Judy and Karol renting a, no joke, hay wagon to go apple-picking in.

Raven didn't kick up a fuss either, just sat there and simmered in his own mirth at seeing his people, his people who might not be dignified but were definitely more dignified than this, cavorting in a hay wagon. There was Yuri simultaneously trying to drive the thing and see out from under the brim of his hat and Karol and Repede on their backs, soon to be extremely itchy, and Judy who seemed immune to the itchiness of hay entirely. There was Rita perched on the edge of the cart watching the scenery go by in a hat of her own and Flynn, who theoretically had refused to let Estelle go off on her own but was failing completely at pretending that he wasn't just as excited as the rest of them, and Estelle herself, sitting up front with Yuri in a bandana and stolen knight's tunic and making a verbal list of all the things that they were going to have to make with their booty. They all had apple baskets and stars in their eyes and even Raven found himself contemplating the merits of trying his hand at an apple tart.

If Raven thought that the ride to the orchard was ridiculous, it was nothing compared to the things that happened once they got there.

It wasn't enough to pick the ones on the lower branches or use a ladder like normal people. No, no. There were plenty of normal people outside of their insane guild, it wasn't like it was some sort of foreign concept to the rest of the world. But no, there were guild leaders, Krityans, genius mages, commandants, princesses, and yes, glorified guild babysitters, climbing trees like crazy people. Apples were thrown, baskets were missed, and Raven couldn't help thinking on the cart ride back that maybe there was a reason he'd been saved that didn't have to do solely with his usefulness, and the thought didn't upset him as much as it used to.

Happiness settled down in front of the fire, flopped onto its back, and kicked its legs in the air, and Raven reached over to scratch it behind the ears.

That winter was cold and wet and disgusting and Raven hated every minute of it.

The area around Dahngrest was pretty wet as a general rule, and when that perpetual dampness was combined with snow, it made for a city that during the winter months just turned into slush. Revolting grey slush that froze around everything you wanted to move and made more people slip and fall than was funny.

Raven spent that winter cold and cranky and in no small amount of discomfort from his blastia, and it became a pretty common rumor that he actually hibernated. Well, until anyone walked into the main room at night and found Raven bundled up in about five blankets by the fire with Repede on his feet, and that was the point at which people stopped asking him to go on optional jobs until springtime.

So, yes.

That winter was horrible, except for the constantly roaring fireplace and how he and Karol would play checkers underneath matching blanket mountains and the way Yuri was really, really good at making wassail with the apples they had left from fall and the way Judy made everyone hate her with the way she could just bound around in the nastiness. Then Estelle became a common fixture when it became clear that bureaucracy was driving her literally up the wall, and then they all found out that for all her cooking anti-talent she was _stupidly_ good at making any kind of pie, and then they all ate pie for weeks, and it was spectacular.

And then there was a day that Raven woke up and his window was covered in white.

Not grey, not purple, but a pristine white that he knew but couldn't believe because Dahngrest didn't get _pretty_ snow. Other places got pretty snow but not Dahngrest. Winter in Dahngrest was everything horrible wrapped up in a giant slushy box but this…this was _beautiful._

So Raven ignored the throbbing his blastia and pushed open the back door. There wasn't a lot of snow, barely a few inches, and it probably wouldn't stick for long, not once it started raining again. There certainly wasn't enough to stick to the naked, bare-branched trees and they stood stark against the backdrop, dark and skeletal. Raven took a step and the snow crunched under his feet, a sort of squeaky crunch like cornstarch. The air was sharp and crisp in his lungs and the chill froze him from the inside out but Raven ignored the call of blankets and chose instead to stand there in the quiet.

A chickadee peered at him from one of those sad branches –glared at him, really, because chickadees always glared even when they weren't- and he nodded to it like he would a friend.

He could hear people in the street, marveling at the unexpected boon of a dry snowfall, and Raven thought of the years he'd have here, how many more times he might walk outside and see something like this. Thinking of the past of the future was a coin he wouldn't flip but he flipped it now and it didn't hurt.

For a good while, Raven stood on the stoop, watching and feeling and hearing and smelling, and he didn't stop until Yuri flung open his window and unwittingly shoved the thick dusting of snow on the sill onto Raven's head, and then all he could do was laugh.

And happiness took all of him, took all he was and all he could be and all he had been. Took all he had to offer and all he didn't and all he couldn't, wrapped around it and purred.

And Raven let it.

Raven always remembered how happiness came, not because it came on with a breath of fire and flame but crept instead.

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AN2: Thank you for reading! If you have anything to say, please leave a review! I'd love to hear your thoughts.


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